Sunday, February 28, 2010

Chapter One. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Beneath his black-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. I love this. New York was his town, and it always would be...

Isaac Davis in Woody Allen's "Manhattan"

New York, New York (So good they named it twice)

from "New York, New York" Gerard Kennedy

Little Joe never once gave it away
Everybody had to pay and pay
A hustle here and a hustle there
New York City's the place where -

From Lou Reed, "Walk on the Wild Side"

If I'd lived in Roman times,
I'd have lived in Rome.
Where else?
Today America is the Roman Empire and New York is Rome itself.

John Lennon

After my last post, Eat yer heart out, other people, I received a number of comments and emails from people who were quite horrified by the loneliness of the close distance New Yorker.

Perhaps I've been in New York too long and used to the New York wise-crack; perhaps I'm out of touch with those all-too-serious others ...

And so here is A DISCLAIMER. An explanation, a put-in-context sorta thing ...

Hey guys, there's a number of New York brunch places who are VERY INTERESTED in taking bookings for cancelled brunches. Better a cancelled brunch, than no brunch at all ... After all, these are hard economic times and beggars can't be choosers.

But seriously folks ... a hundred years ago there was a T.V. show back in OZ called "Hey Hey it's Saturday". There's even a wiki entry about it. So, HEY HEY, please don't think that all we New Yorkers do is have brunch, watch the T.V. and have our nails painted.

ASIF!

We do in fact do a lot more.

And in any case, what do people elsewhere do on weekends?

Today I picked out five random people, and asked them about THEIR Saturday.

Person One (Madge) - an Aussie living in the U.K. Madge was busy picking up hemp (the textile, not the Indian kind) to hand-make birthday presents for her friend.

Person Two: C (Melbourne) was dropping in on her parents and learning to touch-type so she could participate in FaceBook.

Person Three X (New Jersey) : was sleeping in and then cataloging her DVD collection.

Person Four N (Perth): was doing nothing whatsoever - although she claimed that she was enjoing THE VIEW. (I THINK she meant the television series.)

Person Five: (Dunkeld, Victoria, OZ) was researching the difference between cities/places with "New" in their names - compared with places which are as "gateways" to somewhere else.

New York is my favorite city in the whole world, and believe me, I've been to upwards of 100. The only city that comes close to New York is Calcutta, followed closely by Melbourne Australia.

I realise I take the mickey out of New York. Like an old friend or sibling, New York is easy with criticism and parody.

So you see, having a cancelled lunch is really not so bad.

And having a cancelled lunch in THE BEST CITY ON EARTH, is to die for.

And to have it with expertly freshly painted nails, is even better.

And so as my dear old uncle Pete says - I don't know how else to say it, except louder.

6 comments:

If it's the same Uncle Pete, he once told me he was in Singapore lecturing. We were discussing how you have to be careful with language in different countries. He used the expression "too many chiefs and not enough Indians". Well it suddenly struck him that his seminar room was half-full of Indians and then, of course, he had to explain the idiom to them .....